My body hit the wall with a hollow thunk. The wind roared harder; I felt myself being pushed back farther, even though I’m sure I wasn’t moving anymore. I couldn’t even shut my eyes to keep the wind out of them as the sun started coming up over the west side of town.

That didn’t seem right at all. I haven’t been out here all night already, have I?

That didn’t seem right either.

And then I saw a car driving down the street backwards. And then more.

And then crowds of people, all moving in reverse.

I felt like I should be scared.

I mean, I was—but the fear itself was a bit hollow, without my body pumping the chemicals in. I knew I was scared, but I didn’t feel it.

Did some more work on this. Realized Isaac’s position was entirely untenable, so adjusted it a bit. (He was half leaning on his side, but now he’ll be prone.) Also redrew his face some—I never could get the hang of drawing long muzzles.

An idea I had kicking around in my head for a while that I finally started work on at Sketch Night on Saturday. The plan is Isaac, Maxim, Huck, Modi, and Magni all around a campfire outside Dunamy Town on Huck and Maxim’s 18th birthday (old calendar).

Not too happy with the execution yet, though. I’m not sure the sketch conveys the general outline I was looking for, and I don’t like what’s up with Isaac’s head here.

I stayed working late, as usual, trying to get the week’s screw-ups sorted out for payroll.

The pile of confetti at my desk got deeper, hour by hour—I didn’t think I’d had so much fall into my mane… But it was a lot of hair, and I was always finding random stuff in it. This just would happen on the day I leave my brush at home.

It was already dark outside. I squinted at my monitor—it took a couple of seconds before my eyes focused on the numbers. “Um… definitely time to go home and sleep,” I said. I clocked out, logged out, and swept the pile of confetti from my desk into the trash bin, which gave me an all-too-clear experience of how stiff from typing my fingers were. Dang, I thought. I’m really going to have to quit doing these late nights. I gave my head one last shake over the wastebasket—at least a dozen scraps of orange and yellow paper fell out of my mane. Dammit, Stevens, I thought, as I stepped out the front door.

I took a seat by the TV. Emma the front desk girl brought me a piece of the cake, but I wasn’t really hungry. Nobody showed any further interest in me, as usual. The party wasn’t really anything special for me; they brought in cake every week at the slightest provocation and donuts if nobody could think of anything to put on a cake.

Still, it was my birthday and I probably wouldn’t be getting anything but Stevens’ dud piñata. I spat confetti out of my teeth, and tried to remember this morning’s Motivational Life Coach e-mail. “Being interesting is an action,” it’d said, “So go out and do it.” I spent some time trying to think how that could be motivational, pondered for a while whether it really meant anything at all, and had just about sunk into a rather despairing collection of thoughts about how the world had reduced me to the point where an e-mail forward was my biggest impetus in life when I realized it was time to get back to work.

The empty piñata head was sitting on my desk when I got back; it watched me blankly as I worked on the SWAT report and continued trying to get all the confetti out of my mane.

You get three guesses to tell where this story’s going to go, and the first two don’t count.

It all started with a shower of confetti.

Stevens had brought a piñata to the office for my birthday party. It was enormous, almost as big as he was, and a lion, just like me.

“Saw this in a window of that party place on the corner and thought of you,” he said. “He looks just like you, don’t he? Happy birthday, lion.”

I looked it over, and it kinda did, in an exaggerated way: it didn’t look like me so much as it looked like a piñata modelled after me would look like. It was firm papier-mâché—or whatever it is they make piñatas out of these days—with ruffled paper in tawny gold all over its body in place of fur, and long orange paper streamers for its mane. “Thanks, wuff,” I said. “It’s great. Let’s hang ’im up and have a couple swings at him, eh?”